Talk:New Age music

New Age music survived vfd. Per discussion it is now on the cleanup list. See: Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/New_Age_music -- Wile E. Heresiarch 21:05, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)

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moved from User talk:Lexor --Lexor|Talk 16:22, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

New_Age_Music

I see you did some work on New Age Music. This article contains most of the Music sub-section from New_Age, word for word, then a nice little table with other links. Do you think this is right to copy and paste a section from a longstanding article just to make a new one? BF 00:17, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

I did not create New Age music, I merely copyedited (check the history) and haven't looked at the parent New Age article itself. However, it is a good practice to include a two or so paragraph summary of an article in the parent article with a Main article: link to the daughter article which is a longer extension of that summary, which will often include the initial summary from the parent article, e.g. Simulation and Computer simulation. In general that's warranted when it is likely that the daughter article will be expanded with additional information beyond what would be wanted in the parent article, which would probably be the case with New Age music. --Lexor|Talk 03:28, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

You know this article was written without any effort at all. Write a few sentences, grab most of the theme and content from New Age, and add a cute little table at the bottom which doesn't give the reader much to research. Lazy? Yeah! BF 22:32, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

"At its beginings, new age music was closely related to the New Age movement of beliefs." I'd like to see some documentation for this. In fact this article is of very poor quality. It suffers from the same problem as the easy listening article: the people who listen to this style of music very rarely describe it as such - and if they do, they usually refer to a much more specific style (e.g meditation CDs), rather than the styles labeled as such by detractors (e.g Enya). People who listen to Enya will only rarely work on the new age article when explaining their kind of music, because they don't listen to new age music. Other people do that. What are we going to do about this? right now this article is not far from being useless.Vintermann 13:24, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)

Suggested definition

New Age Music is really popular in my country, and by New Age Music people basically understand all those meditation/relaxation CDs that are around. Particularily the label Innovative Communications (1 (http://www.ic-digit-music.de)) had its share of artists that were considered notable: Software, Anugama, G.E.N.E., Karunesh. Also artists such as Suzanne Ciani, Kitaro, Cusco, Space, Gandalf (yes, "Software", "Space" and "Gandalf" are actual band names) - those have at least surfaced here or there, in the press, on illegal MP3 compilations - compared to numerous other musicians ("John St. John" for instance..) who are virtually unknown.

All of the bands/musicians I've mentioned make slow, ambient electronic music, which centers on (that is, with album/track names, or album covers, photography, liner notes..) themes like meditation (Anugama, Software), exotic places (G.E.N.E.), dreams, etc. (Especially meditation (and concepts like tantra, mantra, chakra - things from eastern philosophies) is a recurring theme, and I guess this is why a lot of people think that "New Age Music is connected to the New Age movement of beliefs"). And this, well, seems to be the definition of New Age Music.

As for artists like Tangerine Dream, Enya, Vangelis, Klaus Schulze,.. - well, firstly, their music is very different from what I've described, even though they all have some pieces that sound like generic electronic soundscapes (sic!). Seconldy, several of them (Tangerine Dream) have repeatedly stated they hate the term "New Age Music" and do not consider their music that. Thirdly, they have armies of devoted fans who protest against all kinds of labels connected with "New Age".

So I mean, would it be an acceptable solution to define New Age music by describing it like I did above, or like it is briefly described in the article (The large percentage of music described as New Age music is instrumental, and electronic), and to list several artists from Innovative Communications and similar labels (if someone can actually find those - I don't own any meditation CDs, but I believe at least some of them would have information on record labels) as 'new age musicians'. Other artists (Enya, Vangelis..) could be placed on the same page with a notice saying that they're not widely considered "New Age", and that their music can sometimes be very different from the kind of music described in the article.

I'm not sure if it is NPOV to connect meditation/relaxation CDs and New Age Music, but (a) 'new age/new instrumental' is what at least some of those CDs are labeled and (b) there's no specific term for the kind of music on meditation CDs, which is calm, repetitive and electronic - yet the variying definitions of New Age Music agree that it is calm and electronic.

I don't want to make any edits to the article at the moment, since I have no idea if the definition I offer is going to be accepted. So, could anyone offer opinions on what I'm suggesting? :) -- Jashiin 19:47, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Mike Oldfield

Doesn't classifying Tubular Bells as the first New Age album contradict the definition given in the first place that the beginnings of New Age music were closeley related to the mystical matters of the New Age movement? Oldfield originated from the jazz-related and somewhat humoristic Canterbury Scene. 84.174.254.240 10:59, 25 May 2005 (UTC)